With 2010 just around the corner this seems a good time to look back at the last ten years in food and ask ‘Wow, how did that happen?’
It would be over egging the pudding to say that it has been the most momentous decade for food since man discovered cooking with fire but, a lot has changed since we woke up blinking on the first day of the new millennium, mildly surprised to find that the world hadn’t ended.
Arguably, celebrity chefs have had the greatest impact on the way that we think about food and restaurants. They existed long before 1999 clicked into 2000 (they existed long before 1899 turned into 1900) but this was the decade in which Ramsay went global, Jamie set out to influence government policy and Hugh F-W tried to get supermarkets to change their ways.
The rise of reality TV cookery shows such as Dine With Me and The Restaurant has marked a slight move away from the old celeb chef TV format but it’s by no means their death knell. Without Nigella, Blumenthal and all the rest there wouldn’t be any shows about wannabe restaurateurs.
Away from the bright lights of the telly, there has been a sea change in the public’s attitude to food. Partially due to health scares such as mad cow disease and partially due to a backlash against the perceived industrialisation of food represented by the supermarkets, there has been a growth of interest in where our food comes from, how it is produced and what it will and won’t do to us.
One effect of this is a boom in new ways for food producers to sell and market direct to the public. At the start of the decade, Scotland had one Farmers’ Market in Perth. There are now over fifty. Food festivals would have been almost unthinkable in 2000. Now, with the Taste Festivals, BBC Good Food Shows, the more recent Foodies Festivals and countless localised shindigs, watching a chef prep a souffle and talking to a chicken farmer has become a desirable way to spend a weekend.
I’m not suggesting that all of the Great British public sits down every night to eat a dinner of hand-reared, Farmer’s Market bought lamb that they have cooked according to a James Martin recipe; after all Smash still sells 140 million servings a year in the UK. However, there has at least been a resurgence of interest in food culture and, now, there are fewer of us frightened of the saucepan than there were in 2000.
What do you think? Has our attitude to food really changed in the last decade or is all just media-driven froth?